@Scott-Sumner said:
@Mikhail-V said:
your best bet will be Microsoft fonts like Arial, Times new Roman, Segoe UI
Well, none of those 3 are fixed-pitch (monospaced) fonts, which goes against the grain of the advice given above. The reason for the advice to use a fixed-pitch font is so that columns of text line up.
Yes, I know :-) But I am not sure if the OP knows yet those things.
So just to the possible readers, a short tale about fonts:
It is true that many e-documents especially before 00’s contained
so called “space-aligned” columns, i.e. a user simply tapped space bar
to align columns of text. It was totally ok since anyway computer software
that day used text mode only - so there were no normal fonts anyway.
Only single-width characters, like on a mechanical type-writer were possible.
(That is where Courier font originates by the way - Courier-like fonts were used
in type-writers, and it is probably best that you can get with a monospaced)
For example “i” and “m” are looking really weird in a monospaced font,
because “m” must be actually trice as wide as “i”.
Not to tell about the lack of any kerning and discrete spacings.
That is why if you change a text document from Courier to Arial for example,
you will see a dramatic improvement of the picture.
BTW, the history of legible type design dates back to the BC, and a good font
was never monospaced. In other words, type writers and early computing
fonts made such a “time jump” to the BC, simply due to some technical limitations.
Nowadays, thanks heaven, PC users can use normal fonts, like in a printed book,
Such fonts are well designed, and industrial fonts are also optimized
for readability (well, at a minimum, do not ignore this point completely).
This conversion created a lot of funny memes, like for example: ‘accidental’ features that people of 70’s so much got used to, e.g. pressing space to align columns,
does not work with normal fonts well. Users felt pretty bad about that, and
stood with the monospaced fonts, despite their poor geometry.
Learning to press “tab” instead of space bar was easy, but still
some users could not deal well with it, because at the time there
were no advanced features like tabulations width setup in code-editing
software (and up till now actually, btw, how it is with NPP? ;-).
And that is probably the reason why Courier is the default font
in many code-editors.
Further this issue even evolved in a holy-war “spaces vs tabs”.
That’s all shortly.
resume:
Well, with all respect to 70’s culture, I would strongly recommend to
stick to normal fonts, and for special tasks like multiple selections, learn to use special tools like multi-cursors, or learn scripting.
That will pay-off itself really good.
Furthermore, creating space-filled contents is really bad for exchanging
documents, since you should not assume that on the other side
somebody really lives in a monospaced tradition.
So unless the OP will work on encryption algorithms or memory
viewing, use of monospaced will just make it harder to read in general.
But granted, there are pair of funny issues inherited from 70’s, still
they are solvable.
